Quote from: Dove on August 26, 2025, 03:04:52 PMThe Bible never fails to elicit strong feelings and opinions and i learned a long time ago that there is aways a deeper more personal reason for all of that.

It absolutely has that affect.

If you want to know the Bible I am qualified to teach it, up to a point.

But for months now, this year particularly, every night I become overwhelmed with sadness. I have lost many many people to death. And because I am down hearted and a bit of a misery guts over losing so many, teaching Biblical stuff isn't where I am working well atm.

So I will leave you all with this notion, if you want to get to know God for real, start talking to him in silent prayer. He listens.

Love is the most important thing... agape love. Agape is the Greek word for unconditional love.

 

Quote from: caskur on August 29, 2025, 10:30:14 AMIf you want to know the Bible I am qualified to teach it, up to a point.

But for months now, this year particularly, every night I become overwhelmed with sadness. I have lost many many people to death. And because I am down hearted and a bit of a misery guts over losing so many, teaching Biblical stuff isn't where I am working well atm.

So I will leave you all with this notion, if you want to get to know God for real, start talking to him in silent prayer. He listens.

Love is the most important thing... agape love. Agape is the Greek word for unconditional love.

 

I am sorry for your losses caskur.

Quote from: formosan on August 29, 2025, 10:46:42 AMI am sorry for your losses caskur.

Once you reach your 60s, you start losing older relatives... everyone will go through it... we were talking to one of our old friends 77 who's mum will be turning 104 in December... her mind is still perfect and she has never been on a pension. He has just put her in a home... she just wants to die. She's had enough.

Quote from: caskur on August 29, 2025, 11:18:55 AMOnce you reach your 60s, you start losing older relatives... everyone will go through it... we were talking to one of our old friends 77 who's mum will be turning 104 in December... her mind is still perfect and she has never been on a pension. He has just put her in a home... she just wants to die. She's had enough.

I've never known a centenarian caskur.

Quote from: Shen Li on August 26, 2025, 09:50:09 PMI'm not a mythicist. There's a possibility that Jesus of Nazareth existed. But, he was not born of a virgin. The Bible doesn't even state that. That story was stolen from earlier religions.

Definitions change for a variety of reasons; you saw an example of that recently with the redefining of the words "vaccine". This is not exactly a new concept.

The unearthing of the Dead Sea Scrolls has led scholars to understand that the definition of "virgin" was a lot closer to "barren" than it was to "person who has never had a fuck". Exactly when this particular shift in the nomenclature happened is unclear; it might have been before the Council of Rome determined which gospels to include and exclude, it may have been later. What does seem apparent however is that there was a definite bias towards the texts that deified Jesus at the expense of those that leaned more towards his mortality. Which would honestly make sense to do from a religious standpoint; it's a much taller ask to challenge a supernatural authority than someone who is more or less your equal, no?

Another word that held a definitively different interpretation was "resurrection". An ancient Roman concept, it was the restoration of ones titles and possessions. Around the time this was discovered the scrolls were all shipped off to the Vatican and only those who enjoyed the favour of the church were afforded their study henceforth.

But evidence of a disconnect of understanding yet persists should you read the bible and compare its verses. Perhaps one if the more blatant ones to persist (and even within competing flavours of Christianity itself) would be the actual number of gods. None of us should be arrogant enough to claim a definitive count of "one God" when there are those who regard Jesus as God and others that claim him as the son of God (trinitarian vs non-trinitarian); additionally it seems that God is contradicting himself when in Corinthians and Isiah he is explicitly stating things like "there is no God but Me" while acknowledging the existence of other gods in Deuteronomy and demanding he take precedent over them.

Dove is right to point out that the original texts are many and varied, I would also point out that a good many of these were oral traditions for centuries before being committed to papyrus. To have such a collection, both an incomplete collection of the ancient legends as well as its surviving texts translated and retranslated so long after their initial orators and scribes drew their final breaths... well it doesn't exactly lend itself towards a definitive accounting of historical accuracy. Some choose to argue their interpretation from a position of their own Faith; I'm not one of them any more than I can take it on faith that there is an absence of any God simply because some atheist has picked a myriad of holes in the argument. One God.... Many Gods... No God... ALL of these options require faith in an unproven belief to the average agnostic.

Again though, each competing "sky fairy" has proven unifying in their own way among the people that preach them. There is the value (at least as far as I see it) because its works have included societies that functioned more or less smoothly under its governance.

Without which we would have been little better than your average virus, propagating ourselves without reference to every other viral particle in the vicinity, consuming and subsuming everything to further the individual's dominance over all else. The Bible and other books like it afford us an understanding of the framework we might employ to realise our existence as something more than the sum of our individual parts, if nothing else.